24Oct, 2023
I've had a deluge of requests for a walkthrough of my latest module and the way it can help with excessive garbage data in the xDB. In this video I'll introduce the xDB to non-developers, talk about identifying the cyber attack, and how we can ignore/not capture the false traffic to your site.
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21Sep, 2023
It's taken years of managing Sitecore sites for this one to come across my desk, but apparently there's no protection for the UserAgent value being longer than the maximum allowed length when saving the User's session to the xDB. Though it's fixed since version 10, there's no patch for earlier instances, so we're going to have to add our own pipeline processor to cut the offending UserAgent values short.
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13Aug, 2023
Ok, so dynamic placeholders are very cool and definitely needed, but unlike standard placeholders we depend on using the experience editor to manage them. But what if it's not working, hasn't been coded properly to use EE, or is just too plain slow? Today I'll show you how to manage them with the much faster and more reliable content editor.
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02Jun, 2023
While managing an instance of Sitecore I saw a bot got past the excludedUserAgents configuration, which means its traffic is recorded and we don't want that. Flushing the data out is simple with the Analytics Database Manager, but there are cases where there's transient data queued for processing in the GenericProcessingPool table, and it can be a problem.
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12Dec, 2022
This morning I was alerted to both shard databases burning at 100%, which should never happen in a right-sized configuration. After some checking around, the problem appeared to be bots indexing this site. That's great, we like bots! But Sitecore wasn't identifying these visits for what they were, and began processing them as Users, to be collected into the xDB. Here's a quick guide to keep these bots that slipped past detection at bay.
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